Thirty3rdStudio ("we", "us", or "our") built The Salty Carrot as a personal recipe and meal-planning iOS application. This page describes our privacy practices.
The short version: your recipes, meal plans, pantry, and shopping data live on your device and in your personal iCloud account — not our servers. The optional features — AI assistance, weather, voice input, recipe sharing, and pantry sharing — each act only when you initiate them and can be turned off or revoked at any time. We do not log or retain your content.
Recipes, ingredients, tags, meal-plan slots, pantry items, shopping-list entries, and chat history are stored locally on your device using Apple's SwiftData framework. If you have iCloud enabled, this data syncs to your personal iCloud account via Apple CloudKit. We never have access to your iCloud account or its contents.
Settings you enter — your display name, free-text taste preferences (likes / dislikes), and a free-form Notes scratchpad (for additional context like invitees and their preferences, allergies, or upcoming occasions) — sync to your personal iCloud account via Apple CloudKit so they follow you between devices. We never have access to your iCloud account or its contents. They are also included in AI requests as described below to tailor suggestions.
If you opt in to weather features, an approximate location (latitude, longitude, and a locality name) is stored locally on your device only — it is not synced to iCloud or sent to us. See "Location and Weather" below.
Pantry contents are private to you by default. If you choose to share your pantry with another iCloud user (see "Pantry Sharing" below), the shared items become visible to that user via Apple CloudKit while the share is active.
Deleting the app from your device removes all local data permanently. iCloud data is governed by your own iCloud account settings.
The Salty Carrot uses AI for several features: the "Ask the Carrot" chat assistant, recipe extraction from a URL, photo, or PDF, fridge photo scanning that proposes pantry items, nutrition estimation for saved recipes, and pantry-based recipe inspiration. When you trigger any of these, the app constructs a request that may include:
This request is sent over HTTPS to our Firebase Cloud Functions proxy. The proxy verifies the request comes from a genuine Salty Carrot installation using Firebase App Check, then forwards it to OpenRouter, a third-party AI routing service. Our proxy does not log or store the content of your requests.
OpenRouter's privacy policy governs how they handle data sent through their service. AI features are entirely opt-in — no data is transmitted unless you initiate a chat message, scan, import, or inspiration request.
Recipe photos and PDFs you import are stored locally on your device as part of your recipe data and are included in iCloud backups if iCloud is enabled. Photos are not transmitted to any server unless you explicitly use them in an AI feature (fridge scan, photo recipe import, or a chat message with an attached image), in which case they follow the same path described under AI Features above.
Pantry sharing is an opt-in feature. You can invite another iCloud user to share your pantry from Settings → Pantry → Share Pantry…. Apple's CloudKit Sharing handles the invite, acceptance, and access control; the recipient must explicitly accept before seeing anything.
While a share is active, the invited participant can view and edit the shared pantry items through Apple's iCloud infrastructure. No pantry data passes through our servers. As the owner, you can stop sharing or change participants at any time via the gear icon on the same Settings row, which opens Apple's standard share-management sheet. A participant can leave the share at any time from their own device; on leaving, their copy of the shared items is preserved in their personal pantry.
Sharing a single recipe with a friend (the share icon on a recipe page) is opt-in and acts only when you tap it. The app encodes the recipe's title, ingredients, instructions, system tags, servings, and times into the share link itself and hands the link to the iOS share sheet — you choose where it goes (Messages, Mail, Notes, etc.). The recipe photo is not included in the link; recipients see a generic Salty Carrot preview image.
When the recipient (or the link-preview agent inside Messages/Mail) opens the link, our Firebase-hosted page decodes the embedded data on the fly and renders a preview. The recipe is not stored on any server — it lives entirely inside the URL. That also means anyone who has the URL can see the recipe contents, so share it with people you trust as you would any other link.
Firebase Hosting may record standard access logs (request URL, IP address, timestamp) per Firebase's own privacy practices; we do not run analytics on these logs or correlate them to identifiable users.
Weather context on the Home tab is optional. It is only enabled if you tap Use my location in Settings; if you never tap it, the app does not access your location or contact a weather service.
When enabled, the app captures a single coarse location from iOS, stores latitude, longitude, and the resolved locality name locally on your device only (not in iCloud, not on our servers), and uses it to call Apple WeatherKit for the current conditions. You can clear the stored location, capture a new one, or revoke the iOS Location permission entirely at any time from iOS Settings → The Salty Carrot.
The "Speak items" feature in the Pantry is opt-in and only active while you are using it. The first time you tap the microphone, iOS asks you to grant microphone and speech- recognition permissions; the app cannot record without both.
Audio is captured only during the active recording and transcribed using Apple's Speech framework (which Apple may process on-device or via Apple's servers depending on the language and device). The app does not retain the raw audio. The resulting text is then treated like any other pantry input: items you confirm get saved locally; AI-assisted cleanup, if triggered, follows the same path as other AI features described above. You can revoke microphone or speech-recognition permission at any time from iOS Settings → The Salty Carrot.
The Salty Carrot writes startup and runtime logs to files within your device's app sandbox. These files are accessible to you via the Files app but are not automatically uploaded anywhere. We do not use any crash-reporting or analytics SDK.
We do not integrate any advertising SDKs, analytics platforms, or social media trackers.
The Salty Carrot is intended for users aged 16 and older. We do not knowingly allow anyone under 18 to use the app, and we do not collect personal information from anyone, regardless of age.
If we ever change our privacy practices, we will update this page and revise the effective date above.
Questions? Reach us at:
Thirty3rdStudio —
apps@thirty3rdstudio.com